MS Word Mail Merge Mayhem

[CCHall]

I have a user who's trying to merge a two-page Word document with several thousand records from a text file. Merging to a new document takes a long time and then hangs Word. Merging to the printer takes less time but only prints a fraction of the number of records (for instance, merging the first 5000 will result in a little over 300 actually printing). This happens in both Word 2003 and Word 2007. We're really at a loss as to why this is happening. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
CC

 

[SkipVought]

Do them in chunks. There's is a way to filter the source data. Chek the MailMerge Toolbar.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}

 

[macropod]

Hi CC,

Regardless of whether its 300 records or 5000, both are well within Word's limits - providing you don't end up with more than 32Mb of plain text in the output file. Unless you're running up against that limit (unlikely), it's likely something else about your system (or, perhaps, the data file) is interfering with the process (eg a virus scanner).

As Skip suggests, a workaround might be to split the job up into smaller chunks.

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[CCHall]

Thanks for your responses. The merge has around 17,000 records, and splitting it even back to 1,000 or 5,000 only results in about 300 records being merged and printed.

However, I believe I have resolved the issue by bringing the text file into Excel, saving it, and executing the merge with the Excel file rather than with the text file.

Apparently, Word doesn't have a problem with large merges, just large merges from text files. Go figure!

Thanks again,
CC

 

[SkipVought]

CC,

Thanks for sharing your solution.

Skip,

_{Just traded in my old subtlety...
for a NUANCE!}